Hi, y’all! Indeed, last week, I did not send a newsletter. It turned out to be too busy to pay enough attention to the newsletter. The organizing of ThingsCon’s TH/NGS 2024 conference was the reason. The special edition for the 10-year celebration, including a dedicated exhibition on Generative Things, took some final sprints…
It was a great edition, a reunion of the ThingsCon community, and especially an inspirational moment with all the work of students, fine workshops, and talks. And a great party. Thanks Peter, Iohanna, Alex, Joseph, Peet, Matt, Oana, Alina, Kai, Henrik, Sen, and all the others sharing their experiences in person, for the kind words!
Pictures and videos will be shared as soon as possible, and I will take some time in the holidays to write some reflections on the experiences. We plan to follow up on the theme next year with the exhibition and a new edition of the RIOT publication. Let me use some cues from the three talks on Friday for a triggered thought.
Triggered thought
Where are we now? Simone Rebaudengo took us on a trip through ten years of technology development. Agents, agents, agents. Just like Matt Webb earlier, he stresses the importance of connected agents. Designing is now the design of the relationship and organization between the agents. Not the personality but the system where the agents live.
He refers to Venkatesh Rao: If you build an economy inside things, your control will go from deterministic to stochastic, and maybe it is overkill, but you’ll create true creative complexity. (Venkatesh Rao, 2024)
With the Walkcast, he is already experimenting with how a team of agents can become a micro studio for creative work. He ends with his beliefs for the next things we will make:
It’s the time for small, custom, niche, crafted intelligent things. It’s the time to build non-linear, spatial, unclear, post-conversational tools. It’s the time for complex, surprising & non-deterministic experiences.
It’s the time to design worlds instead of software inside things.
Matt Webb also used the world as a metaphor for the thinking in personal context windows that drive the new things we will develop. A world of agency, where we get self-driving mode in every system. Becoming an adaptive world of mini-apps that make easy things become trivial. In a world of intelligence too cheap to a meter, it will bring ChatGPT-like intelligence in everything, creating a world of tiny personalities with AI affordances. He is ending with a world we must dream. We are aiming to get the strangeness out of this intelligence while this is delivering opportunities to open up new worlds. We miss what this generation of intelligence makes special. Dreaming, invention, stories, all kinds of hallucination. New things happen on the other side of the bridge.
Are there links to how Iohanna Nicenboim aims for a balance between human-centered AI and more-than-human design to reach a more sustainable and inclusive future? Something we might call Regenerative AI, creating conditions where both humans and non-humans can thrive. Twin intelligence. Technology shapes what it means to be human, and also what it is not.
With all the attention given now to agentic AI, and all the expectations for this as the dominant trend for the coming year(s), understanding that we are designing world of agents in things, that can inspire new paths while we stay aware of the connections we make, steering it and letting it steers us. Not towards a certain new tool for general intelligence, but for more humanity.
Read the full newsletter here, with
- Notions from last week’s news on Human-AI partnerships, Robotic performances, Immersive connectedness, and Tech societies
- Paper for the week
- Looking forward with events to visit
Thanks for reading. I started blogging ideas and observations back in 2005 via Targetisnew.com. Since 2015, I have started a weekly update with links to the news and reflections. I always capture news on tech and societal impact from my perspective and interest. In the last few years, it has focused on the relationship between humans and tech, particularly AI, IoT, and robotics.
The notions from the news are distributed via the weekly newsletter, archived online here. Every week, I reflect more on one topic, a triggered thought. I share that thought here and redirect it to my newsletter for an overview of news, events, and more. If you need to find something from the past, use my GPT Weeknotes Archive.
target is new 